THEY FIGHT THE COLD WAR UNDER COVER

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP74-00297R001200300004-5
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 23, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 7, 2013
• Sequence Number: 4
• Publication Date: November 20, 1948
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified and Approved For Release 2013/05/07: CIA-RDP74-00297R601200306004-5
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SA7UPDAY F77,71:G POST , ? ? ,
November 20, 12/48
They Fight the Cold -War
Under Cover
By DONALD ROBINSON
Here's the story of what our new cloak-and-dagger outfit,
the Central Intelligence :Agency, is doing to keep our
secrets?and learn the secrets of other nations. It comes
from those who serve in the little-known organization.
IIATE last spring, Lt. Col. J. D. Tassoyev, Soviet
Guards Officer, was the central figure in a
melodrama of international intrigue that
rocketed onto the front page of almost every news-
paper from Moscow to San Francisco. At the time,
there were two versions to the incident.
Tass, the official U.S. S. R. news agency, charged
that Tassoyev was kidnaped from Bremen to Lon-
don, imprisoned and tortured by the British Secret
Service in an effort to make him abandon his coun-
try's service.
Only because "a scandal was brewing," Tess
said, did the British Governinent ultimately release
the colonel to Soviet authorities.
"The gentleman was here in England of his own
free will," countered the British Foreign Office. -He
left because he was asked to leave."
The American intelligence officers could fill in the
missing chunks of both stories. They could tell a tale
of spy and counterspy that would sound like a movie
thriller. It would be a valuable account, too, for it
would prove that, despite blundering at high levels
and abrasive frictions between agencies of our own
Government, the United States at last has the mak-
ings of an effective intelligence system.
Here is the story the United States intelligence of-
ficers could tell. It comes from official United States
Government sources.
Colonel Tassoyev approached American agents in
Bremen last April with an offer to desert the Soviet
Army. According to the report sent Washington. the
colonel spoke at length about his hatred of commu-
nism, his yearning for democracy. He hinted that he
had a large stock of secrets to divulge.
Such an offer was nothing new to the United
States intelligence men. Scores of Red Army men,
including at least one Russian lieutenant general,
have recently run out on Stalin. Many have given
valuable information. But the American agents told
Washington that they were not impressed with Tas-
soyev. There was something phony about him. In
their radioed report to Washington, the Americans
said point-blank that Tassoyev was a plant. Wash-
ington directed that they have nothing to do with
him.
The American agents didn't, but the British
Secret Service did! Tassoyev went to the British
after the Americans shut the door in his face. The
British took him at his word and flew him to Eng-
land in Field Marshal Montgomery's own plane.
VIDE WORI.D
When our supersleuths flopped. Bloody rioting in the streets of Bogota, Colombia, marked the
opening of the Pan-American Conference there last April. Our operatives' inexperience was blamed.
WIDE WORLD
Director of the lieu outfit. Hear Admiral B.
Hillenkoetter avoids hiring -gumshoe artists."
In London, the British lodged the colonel in a
comfortable six-room apartment and set to work ex-
amining him. They even had one of their young
woman operatives, a blonde named Betty Wiggin,
on hand to help. To their dismay, as Washington
heard the story, the colonel refused to answer any
questions. Instead, he kept asking questions. He
tried to probe into the operations of the Allied intel-
ligence services. He wanted to know about the "Free-
dom Route" that other Russian defectors had
followed.
When the British declined to oblige him, Colonel
Tassoyev at tempted a getaway. He broke out of the
West Kensington apartment and ran to near-by
Olympia Hall, London's exposition center. Bursting
in on the crowds there, the colonel shouted that he
had been kidnaped and demanded to be put in touch
with the Soviet Embassy. A public scene was in the
making, but an imperturbable London bobby, on
duty in the hall, managed to squelch it. He calmly
led the colonel back into custody.
Tassoyev was a plant, all right! By this time, the
British were convinced of it too. But what to do
with him?that was the problem. After talking it
over with American intelligence men, they decided
to send him back. It would teach the Russians, they
felt, that the democracies could not be duped by
their tricks. A few days later, Tassoyev was flown
back to Germany and handed over to the Russians.
The American agents who spotted Tassoyev as a
fraud belong to the Central Intelligence Agency, a
hush-hush, cloak-and-dagger out fit that the United
States Government recently established as a succes-
sor to the wartime Office of Strategic Services. It is
the first permanent intelligence organization that
this nation has ever had in peacetime. Despite the
mistakes it has made, it is gradually building for it-
self a good reputation on both sides of the Atlantic
and the Pacific. The fact that it showed up so well in
the Tassoyev affair by comparison with the vaunted
British Secret Service, for instance, was not lost on
the White House, No. 10 Downing Street, or the
Kremlin.
Only a year old, CIA already has a network of
agents functioning all over Europe, Africa, South
America, the Near and the Far East. It can be au-
thoritatively stated that CIA men have penetrated
everywhere behind the Iron Curtain. Twenty-four
hours a day, dispatches from these operatives flow
into the CIA's closely guarded offices on the seventh
floor of the Federal Works Building in Washington,
D.C. Behind grated windows, these messages are
decoded, co-ordinated and weighed. Added one to
the other, they are supplying top governmental
leaders with an intimate ((o,,iinucd on Pagp 191;
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THEY FIGHT THE COLD
WAR UNDER COVER
(Cost its 'tell f Pam,. 30)
picture of what is going on above and
underground throughout the world.
On the basis of a probing investiga-
tion into CIA's record, the results of
which were checked with a wide num-
ber of important Government officials,
this writer can say:
Months in advance, CIA ascertained
that the Russians were projecting a
drive to oust the Western democracies
from Berlin. As far back as last Decem-
ber, it provided Washington with de-
tails of the Russian plans for blockad-
ing the German capital by disrupting
its rail, river and air transportation.
CIA obtained full facts on the activ-
ities of the 100,000 slave laborers min-
ing uranium for the Russians in Ger-
many, Czechoslovakia and Poland.
More than three months' notice was
given the United States Government of
the Russian communist plot to take
over Czechoslovakia. The massing of
Red troops on the Czech border was
completely reported to Washington.
After the debacle, CIA engineered the
escape to the United States Zone of
Germany of dozens of outstanding
Czech democrats.
CIA agents turned up the proof that
Russia was supplying arms and ammu-
nition to its adherents in Italy and
France.
Continuous inside information has
been furnished Washington on future
Arab moves in the Palestine situation.
On the other hand, the record also
discloses that CIA has stumbled badly
at times. It shows that:
CIA made a mess of its work in con-
nection with the outbreak of violence
that swept Bogota, Colombia, during
the Pan-American Conference there
last April.
Efforts by CIA to learn and properly
evaluate what other nations are doing
in the field of atomic energy have been
a fizzle.
CIA permitted subversives to pene-
trate its own staff. This occurred when
it was given responsibility for the mon-
itoring of foreign broadcasts, a job
formerly held by the Federal Communi-
cations Commission. A number of fel-
low travelers, or worse, who had been
working for the FCC were taken on the
CIA pay roll too. It took months be-
fore CIA awakened to their presence
and cleaned them out.
TI IF: S VIVItH tl" EVEN I NG POST
Experts like Secretary of Defense
James Forrestal and Fleet Admiral
William D. Leahy, the President's
Chief of Staff, ascribe these bungles
largely to CIA's youth and inexperi-
ence. They say that, the organization
has shown real improvement in recent
months.
The Central Intelligence Agency is
not the only Government agency in the
foreign- intelligence field. The State De-
partment's Foreign Service, the Office
of Naval Intelligence, Army Intelli-
gence and Air Force Intelligence also
have their fingers in the pie. Each is au-
thorized to collect any information "of
interest to itself" that is available
through "open channels," such as the
press, radio and official government re-
ports. However, under a formula laid
down by the National Security Coun-
cil, CIA is the pivotal group. It handles
all undercover operations and, in addi-
tion, is charged with correlating all ma-
terial gathered by the others.
Unfortunately, there is evidence of
bitter jurisdictional rivalry and feuding
among these various organizations.
Overlapping functions and unnecessary
duplitation of work are widespread.
And in the opinion of many Washington
experts, these factors are seriously im-
peding the nation's intelligence pro-
gram.
On the bright side of the ledger,
though, is this: CIA has built up a staff
of some thousands of people and is now
striving diligently to give America eyes
and ears in every country on earth. Its
agents abroad are under strict orders to
keep Washington posted on everything
from a mayoralty election to the name
of a prime minister's mistress and the
extent of her influence over him.
Government officials familiar with
CIA operations say that. its men are
closely scanning every facet of the eco-
nomic life in the countries they're in.
Key factories, railroad lines, oil refin-
eries?all these are being ferreted out
and reported back to Washington.
Not long ago, a high Air Force gen-
eral wanted to see just how much prog-
ress CIA had made in this sphere. He
arranged a confidential meeting with
CIA chiefs. At this session, he asked the
CIA people to assume that war with
Country X was going to break out the
following day. How much help, he in-
quired, could CIA give in the determi-
nation of bombing targets.
Inside of five minutes, complete de-
tails were handed him on the location,
description and importance of every
significant industrial target in Country
?(?uuit hug. Mall ?"
X, several thousand in all. In many
cases, photographs were shown him.
The general was deeply impressed. He
told me so.
By orders of the National Security
Council, CIA men are sent into action
whenever the Army, Navy or Air Force
is unable to get data through open
channels on the new weapons produced
abroad. Right now, CIA agents are said
to be working overtime to get specifica-
tions on certain foreign bombers, sub-
marines and germ-warfare develop-
ments.
Though little is being said about it,
CIA is known to be making wide use of
the same spectacular techniques which
OSS employed to rally resistance move-
ments against Hitler. Both in front of
and behind the Iron Curtain, CIA men
are assisting democratic forces to resist
Red excesses. Anticommunist political
leaders, editors, labor-union chiefs,
clergymen and others are getting CIA
support in their struggles to retain or
regain democracy. CIA men call this
"building first columns."
In view of today's international ten-
sions, the biggest assignment CIA has,
of course, is the evaluation of other na-
tions' intentions toward the United
States. It is CIA's duty to tell the Na-
tional Security Council if and when an-
other country plans to start a war
against America. The biggest test CIA
has had to face in this line came during
the "war crisis," last spring. It was a
tough one.
A top-secret cable from Gen. Lucius
D. Clay, United States Military Gov-
ernor in Germany, set off the furor. It
arrived at the Pentagon on a Friday
morning shortly after the communists
had seized control in Prague. Cabinet
officials who read the cable quote Clay
assaying, in effect, that he was ready to
modify his long-standing belief that the
Russians did not intend to start a
shooting war soon. The man sitting on
the hottest spot in the world, in other
words, had shifted his position from
"they won't" to "they might." Clay
explained very carefully, however, that
he had no new evidence to support his
belief; he merely had a hunch and
wanted Washington to know about it.
When a man as responsible as Gen-
eral Clay makes such a statement,
Washington sits up and takes notice.
The CIA was asked to check up?im-
mediately.
For three days and three nights the
CIA staff got no sleep as it got in touch
with its agents in all parts of the world
and assembled all the information on
Russia at its disposal. It had its'opera-
lives check to see if any Red Army
units had been shifted, if new supply
dumps had been established, if Euro-
pean fifth columns had been alerted.
On the following Monday morning,
CIA sent a note to President Truman,
stating: "The Russians are definitely
not going to start a war for the next
sixty days, and in all probability not for
a year."
The President's Cabinet accepted
this estimate and tension eased in the
capital.
The men and women overseas for
CIA today are operating under a score
and more of different covers. As a
rule, they do no spying themselves. No
one wants the men to crack safes or the
women to vamp generals. The risks
would be too great. The main job of
these agents is to make contact with
elements in each country who are will-
ing to support the fight for democracy.
This is not to say that CIA representa-
tives don't also buy a good deal of in-
formation. They do. Most of the CIA
agents are veterans of wartime intelli-
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Declassified and Approved For Release 2013/05/07: CIA-RDP74-00297R001200300004-5
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THE SVITH1)%1' F..1 ENING PuST
gence. Each is required to speak and
read the language of the country in
which he is stationed. In fact. CIA in-
sists that an agent must have traveled
extensively in that area before it sends
him there.
A top Government official who knoWs
the organization inside out says that
CIA has deliberately steered clear of
gumshoe artists in selecting its agents.
He says it much prefers "keen analysts,
with imagination and a flair for win-
nowing the important matter out of a
mass of confused detail."
Training men like that is a tricky
business and a very secretive one, he
declares. As he puts it, -A new CIA
agent has to be taught the techniques
peculiar to covert operations. He has to
be briefed in the area he is going to
from a clandestine intelligence point of
view. He has to be tutored on personali-
ties to know, use or avoid. A secure sys-
tem of communications, with alter-
nates, has to be devised for him and he
has to learn how to use it." And, he
states, this all has to be done in com-
plete secrecy. At no time during his
training can the new agent have any
direct contact, or be in any way identi-
fied, with CIA.
CIA personnel are paid up to $9900 a
year. The total amount of funds avail-
able to CIA, incidentally, is a carefully
concealed secret. All that is known is
that it runs into the tens of millions.
In spite of the missteps CIA has
made, reports have it that even the
British Secret Service has been favor-
ably impressed by its early record. Ac-
cording to an unimpeachable authority,
the British recently urged a virtual
merger of both services. The British
suggested that the two agencies split
the world between them, with some
areas assigned to CIA for coverage and
others to the British. In particular, the
British proposed that CIA handle all
intelligence work for both nations in Rio
de Janeiro, while it would handle every-
thing in Cairo.
CIA refused. Under such an arrange-
ment, it fears the United States might
be left half-blind should war come and
Great Britain be knocked out. In an
uncertain world, the CIA men hold
that America must have its own eyes ev-
erywhere, depending upon no one but its
own organization to keep it informed.
The closest liaison is maintained, how-
ever, between the top echelons of CIA
and the British Secret Service.
How did CIA come into being? Tra-
ditionally, the United States has always
ignored the value of intelligence. It had
no real organization of any kind before
the war, depending upon its military
and naval attaches to pick up any
scraps of information they could. Pearl
Harbor disclosed the tragic results of
this attitude. Nor was our military in-
telligence much improved during the
war. While OSS sometimes performed
Herculean feats, Army G-2 was fre-
quently ineffective. The massing of
German panzer divisions prior to the
Battle of the Bulge was fully noted by
OSS, but G-2 disregarded its reports.
Hence the paralyzing surprise the
Nazis were able to effect in the Ar-
dennes. It was a lack of accurate intel-
ligence on the Pacific war, Maj. Gen.
William J. Donovan, OSS head, says,
that led President Roosevelt, at Yalta,
to make such extensive concessions to
Stalin. F.D.R. was informed by G-2,
states Donovan, that the Japs had an
additional army of 750,000 men in
Manchuria. Anxious to offset this force,
Roosevelt u ent all out to get the Rus-
sians in the Pacific war on our side.
"That report was untrue. The Jap-
anese had no such army," General
Donovan informed t his writer. "It is
tragic that poor intelligence so misled
the President
With the end of World War II. Don-
ovan and others urged President Tru-
man to take immediate steps to estab-
lish a permanent peacetime intelligence
organization. Groundwork for such an
outfit was even laid by the OSS. Before
its various units around the world
closed up shop, they drafted plans and
made arrangements for such a group to
take over. The OSS plans were largely
discarded, however.
Luckily, a recommendation by the
Joint Chiefs of Staff for a temporary in-
telligence setup was accepted by the
President. On January 22, 1946, he es-
tablished a National Intelligence Au-
thority, consisting of the Secretaries of
State, War and Navy, and the Presi-
dent's Chief of Staff. It was not until
the passage of the National Security
Act of 1947, though, that a permanent
intelligence organization was set up by
law. This was the CIA. It came into
official being on September 26, 1947, as
a separate agency reporting only to the
National Security Council, a group com-
posed of the President, the Secfetaries
of State, Defense, Army, Navy and Air,
and the chairman of the National Se-
curity Resources Board.
The law specifically decrees that CIA
"shall have no police, subpoena, law-
enforcement powers or internal-secu-
rity functions." Congress was taking no
chances on propagating a Gestapo.
On the recommendation of Admiral
Leahy, President Truman appointed
Rear Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter
as CIA's first director. The post pays
$14,000 a year. A snub-nosed man of
fifty-one, with closely cropped dark
hair, Admiral Hillenkoetter is a Mis-
souri-born Annapolis graduate who has
had a distinguished naval career. He
was wounded aboard the battleship
West Virginia while fighting off the Jap
attack on Pearl Harbor. Later, he com-
manded the U.S.S. Dixie during the
Solomon Islands campaign. He has
spent many of his twenty-nine Navy
years in intelligence, putting in three
different stretches as a full or assistant
naval attache in Paris. It was he who set
up Admiral Nimitz's intelligence net-
work in the Pacific.
Hillenkoetter is married to the daugh-
ter of a Navy doctor. They have one
ten-year-old little girl. His friends 'say
that he spends twelve to fourteen hours
I ber 241. 1414,
a day at his desk, taking an aftertumn
hour off only once a month for a game
of golf. He generally shoots about
ninety-two. His chief recreation is !he
reading of history. and he is said to be
an expert on the writings of Mary.
Lenin and Stalin, quoting at length
from them to prove a point.
Admiral Leahy says that no man in
the country has a better grasp of the
mechanics of foreign intelligence than
Hillenkoetter. He gives him personal
credit for virtually all of CIA's neon!.
plishments. However, other Govern-
ment officials do criticize Hillenkoetter
for certain missteps. They-say that he
badly erred in filling some forty of
CIA's most important posts with Army
and Navy personnel. They claim that
this was unwise, on the ground that the
services lend only their less, able officers
for duty with outside agencies. These
same officials heatedly censure Hillen-
koetter, for example, for placing one of
his key branches under Brig. Gen. Ed-
ward L. Sibert, who, as intelligence chief
for the 12th Army Group in Europe.
was blamed for the Ardennes surprise.
Hillenkoetter apparently saw some
validity in these charges, because he
recently had General Sibert trans-
ferred back to the Army.
Over in the Pentagon, Hillenkoetter
is particularly assailed for talking too
freely before Congress on the rioting
that punctuated the Bogota Confer-
ence He did this when asked to ex-
plain CIA's failure to warn Secretary
of State George C. Marshall of the
likelihood of broad-scale trouble during
the Pan-American parley.
At an open hearing of a House com-
mittee, the admiral read a number of
the actual messages CIA had received
from its agents in Bogota. They pur-
ported to outline communist plans to
break up the conference.
"We did know of unrest in Colom-
bia," he testified. "We did know that
there was a possibility of violence and
outbreaks aimed primarily at embar-
rassing the American delegation and
its leaders, and this information was
transmitted to officials of the State
Department." He implied that General
Marshall had disregarded the CIA
warnings.
Nothing in H illen koetter's testimony,
though, demonstrated any inkling on
CIA's part that such widespread dis-
orders were in the wind. Furthermore,
(Continued on Page 191)
fl ROA Y INEVI,r; 1'0,1
-Ileh-heh?er?that's the end of the joke ...-
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94
(Continued front Page 192)
the Pentagon believes that Hillen-
koetter did CIA a great disservice in
giving this evidence. He compromised
his Colombian agents and their sources,
it feels.
Actually, Hillenkoetter begged the
congressmen not to make him testify
in public. He was told, though, that if
he refused to testify at an open hearing,
he would be punished for contempt of
Congress.
Even so, one prominent Defense De-
partment official sternly commented,
"He should have gone to jail first."
The Bogota incident brought some-
thing else to light. It showed how squab-
bling between CIA and other Govern-
ment agencies has critically impaired
America's intelligence effort. Hillen-
koetter's evidence disclosed that one
vital CIA dispatch was withheld from
the State Department because Willard
L. Beaulac, United States Ambassador
to Colombia, and Orion J. Libert, the
department's advance representative
in Bogota, insisted upon it. The mes-
sage said that "Communist-inspired
agitators will attempt to humiliate the
Secretary of State and other members
of the U. S. delegation.. . by manifes-
tations and possible personal molesta-
tion."
What happened was this: Under cur-
rent regulations, CIA agents in foreign
countries must submit all their dis-
patches to the ambassador or ranking
diplomatic official present. They there-
fore read this message to Ambassador
Beaulac before radioing it to CIA head-
quarters. Beaulac demanded that the
dispatch be shown to Libert before it
went to Washington. This was done.
According to the CIA men, Libert
stated that he did "not consider it ad-
visable to notify the State Department
of this situation." He was afraid it
might unduly alarm the delegates.
Libert's stand put Admiral Hillen-
koetter in a quandary. He got the re-
port, all right. The ambassador could
not prevent its transmission to CIA.
But Hillenkoetter knew that if he for-
warded it to Secretary of State George
C. Marshall, Beaulac would learn of it
and might make the CIA men's posi-
tion in Colombia untenable. Reluc-
tantly, he decided not to pass this mes-
sage along.
Bogota is not the only place where
CIA has been tangling with State De-
partment people and regulations. It is
common knowl:dge in Washington
that a similar situation prevails in
Italy. The chief British Secret Service
man in Rome is said to have more au-
thority even than the British ambassa-
dor. In the American Embassy, how-
ever, the head CIA agent reportedly
complains of being treated like an office
boy.
There have also been differences be-
tween CIA and the Atomic Energy
Commission. One cause for this- has
been CIA's inability to learn what prog-
ress Russia has made with the atomic
bomb. The other big reason has been
CIA's refusal?on the ground of se-
curity?to tell the AEC the sources for
such atomic-energy information as it
has been able to secure. The AEC main-
tains that it must know these sources
if it is to evaluate the information with
scientific accuracy. Recently, the situ-
ation was somewhat eased when CIA
designated a reliable scientist as a liai-
son officer with the AEC. The AEC has
agreed to accept his judgment as to the
worth of CIA scientific reports. Rela-
tions between the two groups, however,
are still far from amicable.
Evidence is also on hand that CIA
and Army Intelligence do not get
THE S VITIMAY EVENING POST
along. It is known that Army Intelli-
gence took eleven months before it
carried out orders to turn over all its
undercover operations to CIA.
Washington is still talking about the
catastrophic boner Army Intelligence
pulled in connection with a clandestine
project to take aerial photographs of
Poland. In June, 1947, the Army or-
dered S/Sgt. James Hoagland, an Air
Force photographer, to join the United
States Military Mission in Warsaw for
this purpose. He was to make use of
the mission plane for his surreptitious
photographing job. One set of Ser-
geant Hoagland's orders was sent by
diplomatic pouch to Col. Thomas
Betts, the head of the mission. An-
other set of these top-secret papers was
sent through the ordinary mail in an
envelope addressed simply to "The
for the offices of these military at t aches.
Last May, Army Intelligence was
severely embarrassed when a Russian
spy named Mrs. Galina Dunaeva Bi-
conish was able to seduce twenty-one-
year-old Sgt. James M. McMillin, de-
coding clerk in the Moscow Embassy.
The sergeant fell wildly in love with
this beautiful brunette and publicly re-
nounced his American citizenship in
favor of Russia.
Unlike CIA, where opportunities are
being offered for a lifetime career in
intelligence, the Army has almost al-
ways refused to let its officers special-
ize in intelligence work. It assigns men
with little or no intelligence background
to the various G-2 sections. Lt. Gen.
Stephen J. Chamberlin, for example,
who, until his transfer recently, was
Director of Intelligence, Army General
Commanding Officer, Warsaw, Po-
land." Quite naturally, the Polish au-
thorities opened the envelope and
read its contents. They permanently
grounded the Military-Mission plane.
Another move that amazed Washing-
ton was a statement by Army Intelli-
gence people in Germany giving details
of the alleged manner in which they
had spirited former Vice Premier Stan-
islaw Mikolajczyk out of Poland. Cap-
ital officials cannot understand why
Army Intelligence bragged about such
an ultraconfidential topic, especially
since Army Intelligence, they say, had
nothing whatsoever to do with Miko-
lajczyk's escape.
It is true, as Lt. Gen. Albert C.
Wedemeyer, of the Army General
Staff, pointed out to the writer, that
"the caliber of American military
attaches abroad has been vastly im-
proved. We are no longer sending over
teacup pushers with rich wives. Now
we are using military experts who are
thoroughly conversant with the people,
the language and the conditions of the
nations to which they are assigned."
But the Army has not been so care-
ful in its choice of enlisted personnel
Staff, is an officer with G-3 (Plans and
Operations) experience. So is Maj. Gen.
A. R. Bolling, who was his deputy.
Gen. Omar N. Bradley, Army Chief
of Staff, recently recognized this pecul-
iar state of affairs and made a move
that to Army men is 100 per cent revo-
lutionary. He said to this writer, "I am
recommending to the General Staff that
the Army establish an intelligence corps
in which personnel can specialize in
intelligence just as artillery men con-
centrate on guns, and armored-corps
men on tanks."
The Office of Naval Intelligence is
already veering in this direction. It has
instituted a separate section just for
intelligence experts and other special-
ists. This will allow them to focus ex-
clusively on their specialties without
the old-time necessity for regular tours
of sea duty. The stress that ONI is now
placing on intelligence can be seen in
its training program. Where the Army
gives its military attaches and other
intelligence men four months' school-
ing, the Navy puts its men through a
fifteen months' course.
ONI men, by the way, are quick to
deny responsibility for Secretary of the
Nfnettilier 24). 190, \
Navy John L. Sullivan's statemer.t
about the presence of "unidentified
submarines" off the California coast.
During congressional hearings on the
draft, Sullivan got headlines by inti-
mating that Russian submarines were
reconnoitering American waters. He
noted that similar reconnaissance by
Nazi and Jap submarines prefaced
Pearl Harbor.
A news report of the secretary's re-
marks was the first indication ONI had
of the presence of those submarines,
An immediate investigation was or-
dered. According to a Navy Depart-
ment spokesman, ONI found that there
was nothing to Mr. Sullivan's state.
ment. No Russian submarine was then
closer to the United States than 3000
miles.
The Air Force's intelligence service
is reputedly doing a good job, although
it is occasionally attacked for alleged
wild-eyed exaggerations in its esti-
mates of Russia's combat air strength.
In as much as General Vandenberg, the
Air Force commander, is an old intelli-
gence man himself, Air Force Intelli-
gence has been receiving consistent
support in terms of funds and per-
sonnel.
At the State Department, it is said
that Secretary Marshall has made sev-
eral attempts to better its foreign.
intelligence reporting. The same pat-
tern is still followed, though, with all
dispatches channeling through the
various ambassadors and ministers.
This, it is stated, has frequently re-
sulted in only that information reach-
ing Washington which has shown the
particular envoy in a good light or
which has reflected his personal politi-
cal views.
Whether this be the reason or not,
members of the Senate Foreign Affairs
Committee are bitter about the de-
partment's forecasts of the results in
the last French municipal elections.
The department told the committee
that General DeGaulle's new party
did not have a chance, that the com-
munists would sweep the polls. In-
stead, the Reds were decisively trounced
and the Gaullists won an outstanding
victory.
The FBI has not been in the for-
eign-intelligence field since early in
1947, when it was directed to trans-
fer its wartime Latin-American net-
work to the Central Intelligence
Group. It is now responsible solely
for counterespionage activities within
the United States and its possessions.
There is antagonism between it and
CIA.
Official Washington is aware of this
feud and the other internecine strife in
the intelligence family. In behalf of the
National Security Council, Secretary
of Defense James Forrestal has ap-
pointed a three-man-board to look into
it as part of a broad survey it is to
make of all American intelligence op-
erations. On the board are Allen W.
Dulles, who headed the OSS mission
to Switzerland, William H. Jackson,
New York lawyer and wartime intelli-
gence ace, and Mathias F. Correa,
former United States attorney for the
Southern District of New York.
While the full findings of this board
will probably never be made public, it
is expected to demand that the inter-
agency squabbling stop and that all
groups co-operate in the drive to give
the United States the best possible
eyes and ears around the world. The
board is said to believe that a fair
start has been made in this direction,
but that much remains to be done if
another Pearl Harbor is to be avoided.
. . THE END
Declassified and Approved For Release 2013/05/07: CIA-RDP74-00297R001200300004-5